Cross-Country Runs

As predictable as Christmas lights going up, as swallows returning home, comes another event, ringed black on the calender, and spoken of with bated breath in our household 'The school cross-country run.' 
'You'd have to do it if we were in UK too' I say in bracing tones to First and SecondBorn.  'We've all been there.'

But that's not quite true.  For here we are at altitude, 5500 foot up, where the running is harder. The runs are longer - 4k for nine-year old SecondBorn, 5k for twelve year old Firstborn. And while the littlies start racing in an 830am chill, by the later races, the tropical sun is full out. Not quite the same as my be-drizzled runs round Swansea's (sealevel) Singleton Park.

Like the London Marathon or the Tour de France, it is gripping to watch.  Inspirational, uplifting, to cheer lithe whippets on top of their game gliding home a lap ahead of the rest of the field.  Watching blythe, innocent year two girls, skipping in their first few paces, bunches bobbing in the breeze.  But like the Tour de France, by lap two you see the grim carnage etched on many faces.  The innocent year two faces, tears streaming, life hasn't been like this before. The plumper kid at the back of the pack - as she knows she will be from last year and the year before that - plodding onwards but singled out, despite everyone's best efforts.

I'm not against cross country per se. I'm not against pushing yourself. I'd even call myself a (very sporadic, lapsed) runner. But I am out there, on the barricades, shouting and tearing up paving stones, against competitive cross country in the third week of term, after an eight week winter break.  In First and Secondborn's first year here, this was the point where they pleaded, tears in eyes, streaming noses, PLEASE let us go back home. Secondborn, deer in the headlights from transition from one country to the next, didn't yet know the name of a single child in his class. Firstborn was eloquent and accurate that she was already being pushed to the limit struggling into school each day feeling this overexposed and insecure.  Why should she expose herself still further when she felt she had no safety nets of friends?  We wouldn't allow it in Maths, - annual ritual public immolation of the poorest performers.  Why is it acceptable in a physical setting?

The school would say - and do - but we need to have the school cross country now, so we can send the best runners to the Nairobi-wide and the national heats later in the week. I'm not against competition, but we all KNOW who the best runners are.  And we're proud to be associated with them, and wish them well.  But for the middle-ranking runners in my family, I'd rather they weren't put off running itself by public competition so early in the season.  Couldn't we send off the good runners to compete without a pre-test - and save the public cross country and parents and timings and medals and all for the end of term, when its more in the stride of the majority?

So how is a school cross country different in Kenya?  Firstborn failed to finish yesterday. Came shuddering and supported by a friend to the steps where I was sitting, awaiting her plodding but triumphal finish. I assumed she was overheated, had gone too fast. Was surprised she'd managed 4.5k to then collapse without finishing.  Until she got her breath back, calmed down, some twenty minutes later.  Nearing the home straight she prepared for her sprint finish. To be told by the teacher counting laps
'You can't finish yet. You've got another lap (another kilometre) to do.' 
In vain to protest that she'd run with the same peers all through. That she - and I, an anxious spectator - had been counting.
'Didn't you argue the point?' I asked later.
'What's the point. You know him. He's never going to admit he might have been wrong, even if he knows he was.'
So Firstborn burst into floods of tears. Couldn't bear the thought of a sixth kilometre, alone. Of finishing, not midfield, but exposed at the tail, in full sight of all.  When she knew she'd run what she should have.  And when the Head of PE appeared, was offered the choice of withdrawing now, within 200 metres of the finish, or of running the sixth kilometre.

So she opted out.

Mistakes happen everywhere. Its a major operation to count 300 kids and their laps. Attention to detail isn't at its Germanic peak in Kenya.  Secondborn, a stronger but equally reluctant runner, reported with glee
'I won't need to go to the Nairobi-wide heats, because X and Y came tenth and eleventh because they'd each missed a lap, - so they have to go to Kenton now instead!'

But in Kenya, for many teachers, what the teacher says, goes. It's a power thing, a hierarchy. Mwalimu knows best, even on matters outside the subject curriculum.  No arguing. I think it matters to accept that on many things we only have a partial perspective. That we may be wrong. Science may yet prove different. On some things, shock horror, the child may know best. It doesn't impune your manhood to accept this. But I can see why Firstborn assessed this as a battle she wasn't going to win.  Rocks and hard places. Giving in gracefully.

But as a stroppy Mum its a hard lesson for me to learn. I can't get away from how things SHOULD be, aka, how I am used to things being, aka, how they once were, back home, back then. Firstborn has adapted, learned some of the lessons of happy survival in Kenya. And in this too I, her mother, am trailing behind, in the rear.